


The fortune cookie

by MotherMaple



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Collaboration, F/M, Fluff, Supernatural - Freeform, what happens next?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:46:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24328237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherMaple/pseuds/MotherMaple
Summary: Betty and Jughead meet in a very, very strange way.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 17
Kudos: 91
Collections: 7th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	The fortune cookie

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time, before facebook was even a thing, when dinosaurs walked the earth, I was in a certain fandom that shall remain nameless, and one of the things we did in the forums was write collaborative fic. It was rather fun, starting something and not knowing what would happen next, and I thought it might be cool to do one for Bughead. 
> 
> So here's chapter one of a WIP - I'm very fond of it, and I would very much like to see what happens next. I hope some of you are equally curious.

  
  
  


Jughead had seen that look on Archie’s face before:

  * The first time Veronica walked into Pop’s.



  * When Cheryl showed up at Senior Prom looking like Jessica Rabbit-lite.



  * Every year when the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition showed up at the door, reverently wrapped in tasteful cellophane.



But he’d never seen it directed at himself, and it was a little unnerving. Then again, it was college. People experimented and he supposed his roommate was no different.

  
  
  


“Morning, Arch,” he yawned, shuffling towards the kitchen. “Could you quit staring at me like a piece of meat, please?”

Archie stiffened on the sofa, pausing a video game and swivelling around to face him. “I’m sorry,” he said contritely. “You caught me off guard, but it won’t happen again.”

Jughead had heard that tone of voice before, too.

  * That time Archie’d tried to make his mother breakfast on her birthday and ended up not only getting pancake batter on the ceiling but rendering the very expensive electric mixer down for the count.



  * The day he slept in and missed Josie’s audition for Julliard. 



  * His six-week anniversary with Veronica, forgotten, and then cluelessly shrugged off as ‘not a real thing’.



  
  
  
  


“Archie.” Jughead plopped a mug under the Keurig and turned it on. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Archie’s eyebrows furrowed, and he stood up, coming towards the kitchen. “I’m really sorry,” he said again. “But do I know you from somewhere?”

It was way too early for this, and last night’s Chinese food was not sitting well. “Dude, I haven’t had my coffee yet. Save it for the second cup, please,” he sighed, leaning his elbows on the counter and resting his head on his hands. 

“Are you okay?” Archie asked, tentatively touching his shoulder. “Do you want me to wake up Jughead for you?”

“Dude!” Jughead stood up and glared at Archie, preparing to blast him for being an idiot before noon. Something was off, though. “Did you grow?” he asked, straightening up and coming level with Archie’s Adam’s apple, which he was pretty sure he’d never even seen before. 

“Ok,” Archie said nervously, backing away. “Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll just get Jughead for you. What did you say your name was?”

.

.

.

“Betty Cooper!” she growled into the phone, wincing at the strange timbre of her voice. “I was there last night, around nine o’clock. The lady with the fortune cookies said that they were blessed with special properties, and I’d thank her in the morning. If she did what I think she did, I am  _ not _ thanking her.”

She heard the sound of the phone being put down, and then the irate cry of “Mother! What did you do?”

A string of unintelligible shouting followed, clearly two women arguing, and then the receiver was picked up again. 

“I’m so very sorry Miss Cooper. Please, come to the restaurant and my mother will help you.”

Well, that was all well and good, but meanwhile, she had to pee, and she was in a strange man’s body.

.

.

.

Archie didn’t wait for an answer, backing down the hall towards Jughead’s room. Jughead rolled his eyes and took a sip of his coffee, immediately retching and turning to spit it into the sink. “God, that’s disgusting,” he muttered, reaching for the sugar bowl. He froze, staring at his hand in front of him. 

He took his coffee black.

And he didn’t wear nail polish.

  
  
  


Slowly, he put the coffee down and stepped out of the kitchen. “Arch!” he shouted. “Get in here!”

Archie was already on his way back, looking confused and concerned. “Jug’s not there. Did he get up early or something?” He took stock of Jughead’s horrified face. “You okay?”

“Archie, this is going to sound crazy, but what do I look like?”

The deer in the headlights look wasn’t new either. “Look, you’re really pretty but if this is some weird test Veronica cooked up to tempt me, you’re wasting your time …”

“ _ Pretty? _ ”

“Well … yeah.” Archie shrugged, like it wasn’t a strange thing to say at all. “Hitchcock blonde and all.”

“ _ BLONDE? _ ” Jughead reached up to grab his hair, his fingers clenching around a mass of long curls piled on top of his head. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “Oh my God.”

“Ok, now you’re freaking me out. Who  _ are _ you?” Archie said, drawing himself up to his full height and crossing his arms. 

Spiralling, Jughead frantically took stock of himself. Wrong height, manicured fingernails, long hair. He looked down and saw dainty feet with bright pink toenails, and long, smooth legs. He glanced at the coffee cup - wrong tastebuds. “Oh my God,” he whispered again.

_ Wrong voice.  _

Archie caught him just before he hit the floor.

.

.

.

“Well this won’t work at all,” Betty muttered, staring at herself in the mirror. Take-out Guy was a tall drink of water, no question, but he - she? - couldn’t go out in her pyjamas. 

Which begged the question of how he got  _ into _ her pyjamas in the first place.

She remembered seeing him at the restaurant, slouched against the foyer wall and fiddling with his phone. Her date, Adam, had been in the restroom at the time, and Betty was glad for the reprieve from the most boring conversation in which she’d ever been cursed to partake. 

Take-out Guy, whose face she knew but whose name she did not, hadn’t looked up at her, but she had been amused to see the elderly matron of the restaurant personally hand him a paper bag bulging with takeout containers and then pinch his cheeks when he obligingly leaned down. 

He didn’t notice Betty’s absent smile when he wrapped one arm around the lady’s shoulders and kissed her forehead, but that didn’t mean it went  _ un _ noticed. The lady had caught Betty’s eye and winked, then lifted a small silver tray with two fortune cookies on it, and offered one to Take-out Guy. He took it with a soft smile and then left the restaurant with a half-salute to the staff.

Before Adam came back, Betty had also been offered a fortune cookie from the tray, with the lady’s promise of a bright morning to come. 

After that, things got a little fuzzy. She remembered telling her waitress that she had to go home, to apologize to Adam for her. She thought she’d left some money on the table, but she wasn’t sure. She remembered stumbling once or twice on the way to her apartment, fumbling with her clothes when she got home. That should have been a clue - trying to get undressed for bed, and not remembering putting on so many layers.

Waking up had been a nasty shock. She’d yawned and stretched, surprised to feel her toes hanging over the end of her bed. Then she’d sat up and wiggled her feet into her slippers as usual, except that it wasn’t as usual, because the slippers didn’t fit. Frowning, she’d flicked on the bedside light and gasped in horror at the incredibly hairy calves showing at the bottom of her cropped pyjama pants. God, had she gone on a date without  _ shaving _ ? What if she’d brought him  _ home _ ?

Her legs were nicely toned though, she noted with pride. Her new running routine was paying off more than she’d realized. Standing up and heading into her en suite bathroom, she’d absently pulled on her bathrobe, not noticing that the cuffs ended several inches above her wrists, and it was far too tight across the shoulders.

It wasn’t until she’d looked in the mirror and saw a dark smattering of stubble across her cheeks, and fluffy black bedhead where her neat blonde curls usually sat, that she finally twigged that something was very, very wrong. 

.

.

.

“Ok, one more time from the beginning,” Archie said patiently, sitting on Jughead’s bed next to him. “You’re Jughead, but you’re a woman.”

“No! I’m Jughead, wearing a woman’s body!” Another wave of nausea rolled through him. “Oh God, what if this is someone’s body.” He looked at Archie with wide eyes. “What if this isn’t some random body that took over, but I switched bodies with a real person. What if this woman,” he gestured to himself, “is running around looking like me?”

“It wouldn’t do much for her sex life,” Archie joked, his laughter dying at the look on Jughead’s face.

“This is breaking like every rule of consent,” Jughead muttered, drawing up his knees and wrapping his arms around them protectively. “I need to find her and figure this out.”

They’d been over it a hundred times, Archie picking through every strand of memory Jughead could come up with, first to prove that it was really Jughead in the petite blonde’s body, and then to try and figure out how exactly he’d come to be residing in it.

Magic seemed to be the only possible solution, as impossible as it should have been, and neither of them had a clue what to do about it.

“This seems like the kind of thing that happens in Greendale,” Archie said. “Maybe we should head back home and visit that weird book store?”

“I doubt a guy in a vampire costume knows anything about real magic,” Jughead scoffed. “Besides, how would we explain it? I’ll just show up at my dad’s trailer looking like this and say hi?”

“Or my dad’s and we could say you’re my girlfriend?”

“Absolutely not,” Jughead said flatly. “I’ve seen the fake dating thing play out before and forgive me, but I don’t want to accidentally fall in love with you.”

Archie looked at him appraisingly. “I dunno, man. It wouldn’t be that bad …”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m just saying. You’re pretty hot.”

Jughead reached up and smacked the back of Archie’s head. “Treat her with some respect for God’s sake, please,” he groaned. “How do you think she’s going to feel about all this?”

.

.

.

_ What if he’s playing with my boobs? Isn’t that what guys always say? If they woke up in a woman’s body, they’d start masturbating? _

She shook her head fiercely and regarded the pile of men’s clothes on her bed. Clearly, she’d brought her new self home in Take-out Guy’s clothes and changed into her own pyjamas. Obviously, she’d already seen and touched at least some of the skin under said pyjamas.

Still, Betty couldn’t help feeling guilty about invading his privacy, even if it was to save him the embarrassment of walking around New York in pink paisley. A large part of that, she knew, was her projecting on him and the potential that he was, at that very moment, standing naked in front of his own mirror. 

He didn’t seem like the type, though, based on what she’d seen. She decided not to worry about it, and reasoned that even if he wasn’t as conscientious as she was, bigger jerks had seen her ass.

(She closed the blackout drapes and changed in the dark.)

.

.

.

Meanwhile, Jughead was pacing the living room floor, sweatpants dragging on the floor and a baggy NYU hoodie completely swamping his small frame. He’d gone to bed in panties and a camisole, apparently under the mistaken impression that he was wearing his usual underwear.  He regretted the eyeful Archie had gotten that morning, but had to give his friend points for good behaviour when faced with what even he could see was a very attractive, half-naked woman.

“Everything was fine until just before I went to bed,” he recited. “I came home with the take-out, ate most of it, put away the leftovers …” his voice trailed off as the pieces fell into place. "Sonofabitch.”

“What?”

“Mrs Lo’s magic fortune cookie. I thought she was joking.” He remembered her twinkling eye when she gave him the cookie, telling him that it would make all his dreams come true. “I thought it was just a good cookie! She cursed me!”

“Like  _ Brave _ ?” Archie asked excitedly. “So you have three days to fix it or it becomes permanent?”

“I didn’t turn into a bear, Archie!” Jughead’s heart started to race. There was no way this could be permanent, right? He couldn’t spend the rest of his life in someone else’s body. There was no way the person that belonged to this figure could eat the way he did, for one thing.

He thought back. He’d eaten the cookie just as he left the restaurant; everything was as foggy as if he’d been black-out drunk, but he remembered feeling a sense of deja vu as he walked out the door. He remembered struggling to finish his usual portions, and feeling slightly nauseous as he’d shrugged off his clothes and fallen into bed. 

“This happened at the restaurant,” he whispered. “I switched bodies with this girl at the restaurant, and I didn’t notice. She must have been there when I was.”

.

.

.

“Forgive me, Miss Lo, but your mother is insane.”

The restaurant manager frowned in disapproval but gave a grudging nod. “She has her faculties, Miste - Miss Cooper, but she also has a bad habit of meddling. Not crazy, just a talented old woman who likes to think she’s Cupid.”

“Cupid would have set me up with a date, not a beard, Miss Lo.” She wasn’t usually this blunt but she’d spent twenty minutes trying to figure out how to tame a morning erection without touching it before it mercifully went away on its own and she felt safe enough to use the bathroom. 

On the other hand, she’d walked the six blocks to the restaurant without being cat-called once, which was definitely a new record for her in the city.

“How do I get my body back?”

“I don’t understand the magic, Miss Cooper, my mother will ...”

The front door flew open with a bang. “Mrs Lo!”

Betty and Miss Lo turned towards the voice in surprise, giving Betty what she would later describe as a ‘freaky, out of body experience.’ She watched herself stride through the restaurant in last night’s clothes, a baseball cap jammed over her unruly morning hair, with anger and humiliation written all over her face. 

Not-Betty noticed Betty just as Mrs Lo came out of the backroom, and he stopped in his tracks. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, taking off the cap and failing to run his hand through his - her? - tangled hair. “That’s mine,” he said, with a lopsided grin that didn’t fit her face at all. “I’d like it back, please.”

“Likewise,” she said, growled really, folding sinewy arms over a strangely flat and hard chest. “What on earth did you do to my hair?”

He held up his hands defensively “Hey, I didn’t touch it. I woke up like this and I didn’t touch  _ anything _ .”

“Thank God for that,” she muttered. “Mrs Lo, you owe us an explanation.”

The old lady beamed, reaching up and patting them both on the cheek. “The magic only works if it is meant to work,” she crowed delightedly. “It will wear out in due course.”

“What does that mean, Mama?” 

“When they understand, they will understand.”

Betty looked at Not-Betty in confusion, hoping that he would have some clue what that meant. He looked as baffled as she felt. She’d felt his expression on her own face often enough.

“How long does that take?!” Betty exclaimed. “I can’t go to  _ work _ like this!”

“There is no timeline on love,” Mrs Lo answered, folding her hands beatifically. 

Miss Lo, head in hands atop the takeout counter, groaned and rubbed her temples. “Miss Cooper, Jughead, I am so sorry.”

“ _ Jughead _ ?” The man wearing her clothes - and her body - was named  _ Jughead _ ? This had to be a nightmare.

Ignoring her interruption, Miss Lo forged on, not looking up from her hands. “We will of course pay for any lost wages you suffer while this … situation ... resolves itself. I hope you can forgive my mother.”

It was actually pretty impossible to stay angry with the little lady, who stood between them, patting both of their hands and smiling up at them. 

.

.

.

Mrs Lo had been feeding him since he moved to New York. She made the best egg rolls in the city and she always gave him extra chow mein. 

His grandfather, Sergeant (retired) Forsythe Jones the First, had always said, “Keep in with the cook.”

“I’m sure you meant well, Mrs Lo.” He’d never get used to hearing that soft voice come out of what seemed to be his mouth. It had, in the past, been pointed out that he was a fairly ‘effeminate fella’ but there were _ limits _ .

His body, housing a confused and frustrated woman, nodded in grudging agreement. “There’s no point crying over a spilled milkshake.” Miss Cooper looked over at him, meeting his gaze for the briefest half-second, before turning away with a wince. “It’s too early for this. I haven’t even had breakfast yet.”

“I’m still full from dinner,’ he quipped, “which I can assure you has never happened before.”

“Well your body isn’t,” she retorted. “I could eat a horse if it stood still long enough.”

That sounded more like him. He couldn’t believe she’d been able to drag his corpse from her house to the restaurant without breakfast, and it frankly probably wouldn’t be wise to push her - their - luck. “Well, the way to my heart is through one of our stomachs. Want to get some breakfast while we wait for Alice and the Mad Hatter to stop by?”

“My mother’s name is Alice and I wouldn’t invoke it if I were you. If she found out about this, she’d have your dossier and family tree all the way back to the Mayflower before you could say ‘invasion of privacy.’

Jughead watched her curl his lips into a sneer and then relax, his face schooling itself into a neutral, polite expression. (If he could actually do that, he might have escaped juvie.)

“Alright then, no fairy tales allowed.”

Mrs Lo, still standing between them and stroking their hands fondly, suddenly clapped her hands and shooed them towards the door. “Enough talking, children!” she cried. “Go, eat, fall in love!”

They were on the street with the door shut, ‘closed’ sign in place and blinds drawn, before they could protest.

“Alright then,” he said. Well, there was only one way to go from here. “Hi. I’m Jughead Jones.”

.

.

.

“Betty Cooper.” Shaking her own hand felt counterintuitive, but  _ not _ shaking the hand that Jughead Jones was using felt rude. “God! This is so weird.”

“You’re telling me? Three different guys propositioned me this morning. I felt like I was naked walking down that street.” They both looked down at the slim brown corduroys and ankle boots he wore below a nicely tailored beige jacket. “I feel like I should apologize on behalf of my entire gender.”

“You get used to it,” she shrugged. “Not to say I didn’t enjoy the break.” His eyes clouded over with sympathy and guilt and she had to look away from him. “It’s weird seeing myself look sorry for me. Stop it.”

“Sorry.”

Without discussing it, they turned left and started walking down the street, Jughead struggling a bit to keep up with her. “Hey, Betty? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m six inches shorter than you and I’m wearing heels for like, the first time ever. Could you maybe slow down?”

“Sorry, I’m used to having to walk fast to keep up with most people. I’m never the tall one.”

Well, that wasn’t strictly true. Veronica was shorter, but then, Veronica never walked. She was chauffeured, or she did that weird thing where it looked like she was sailing in her custom Louboutins.

“I don’t even move that fast in my own body,” he said, panting gratefully when she slowed to a gentle stroll. “What’s your hurry?”

“One of us is hungry,” she said, laughing ironically. “I’m not sure who, to be honest, but this body needs food, stat.”

“Probably me.” 

Definitely him. She was easily satisfied with some eggs on toast or a fruit-and-yogurt parfait. The gnawing in Jughead’s stomach felt like it would take a farmer’s special to fill. 

“You like Pop’s?” he asked, pausing at the corner and shifting from side to side, trying and failing to shove his hands in the pockets of his cords. “Why do these even exist? Can you fit anything in them?”

“Nope. They’re just there to be annoying. Who’s Pop?”

“Pop Tate. He owns a diner a few blocks that way.” He nodded in the right direction, and she shrugged.

“As long as you don’t think we’ll run into anyone we know. This is going to be impossible to explain away.”

Right. Pop would definitely pick up on whatever this was. 

“On second thought …”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> So, if you liked it, leave me some love.  
> If you liked it and want to write chapter 2, call dibs in the comments. The idea is that a different person writes each chapter and we see where we end up. Light and fun, if you please :) 
> 
> UPDATE: bestpillowtalkever (@bugheadsextape on Tumblr) will be taking chapter 2! If anyone else wants to play, say so in the comments and you'll get dibs on chapter 3 and so on ...


End file.
